Leaving Yahoo!
I’ve thought a lot about how to begin this post, but it’s best to get right to the point (especially in light of the speed of Techcrunch). I’m leaving Yahoo! to pursue another very exciting opportunity: joining the Etsy team as CTO. I’ll save my thoughts on Etsy for later, but for now I will say that Etsy and the community it serves are all-around inspiring and I can’t wait to jump in.
(See the blog post from Etsy).
I really couldn’t be more thankful for my experience at Yahoo and to the people who made it such an amazing journey, or more excited about the next chapter in my career and life. I had an amazing run. Long-time readers of this blog might remember that I literally proclaimed one of my three years at Yahoo! as the best year of my life. In the past, I’ve told people that I’ve had all of the best jobs at Yahoo, and I have: running the Hack program, the Yahoo! Developer Network (where I had the privilege of working with the Pipes and MyBlogLog teams, too), and now Brickhouse, where we shipped both Yahoo! Live and the Fire Eagle beta. It has been an unbelievable experience. Yahoo! is a great company full of incredible people.
In each of those roles, I’ve had a unique opportunity to get to know many people inside and outside of Yahoo! Literally hundreds of people were helpful and supportive of me at Yahoo! so I am reluctant to list names. I spent a few hours on a list of people to thank and realized when I hit 150 that it was too unwieldy — the list included everyone from well-known execs to the groundskeepers who made sure the lawn sprinklers didn’t come on during Open Hack Day. Feeling gratitude to so many people is definitely a high-class problem. It amazes me that so many of the folks at Yahoo! shared their personal talents and gifts with me so profoundly. You know who you are and I thank you from the bottom of my heart.
In leaving, I’m confident that Brickhouse is in good shape. The product teams (Fire Eagle and Yahoo! Live) are focused and cranking. Brickhouse continues to attract new talent and strong support from Yahoo! management. I’m pleased to be handing the reins over to Mike Folgner, who was CEO of Jumpcut, where he took Jumpcut from idea to product to acquisition by Yahoo! The team won’t miss a beat without me. Tom Coates , Eric Fixler, and the other folks on the team are rock stars.
If you’re familiar with Etsy, you know they are in New York. Brooklyn, to be exact. That means I will be moving to New York. On a personal level, the quiet tug back east has been persistent recently. My mother-in-law passed away in mid-May, my first loss of someone I cared about so deeply. At the same time my mother was battling a terrible illness and spent a few months in the hospital back home in NC, only to be cured by a last-ditch treatment. When miracles happen, it changes your perspective. And how can you go wrong living in New York? To quote John Lennon in the recorded version of his not-quoted-very-often song “New York City,” — “what a bad-ass city!” That pretty much sums it up.
I’ll be in the Bay Area for a few more weeks before heading out to New York. To my Bay Area friends and colleagues, you have given me so much in my time here, I can’t thank you enough. The time I spent out in California this past ten years has literally been life-changing. To my New York friends, I look forward to reconnecting. To quote a famous New Yorker, “today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of this earth.”
WordPress meetup at Y! Brickhouse Wednesday night
We’re hosting a WordPress meetup at Y! Brickhouse this Wednesday night, July 2. If you’re planning to come, go sign up on Upcoming. See you there!
The Art of Capacity Planning
I’m really excited about John Allspaw’s forthcoming book, The Art of Capacity Planning (available in as-it-is-being-written form on O’Reilly’s Safari Rough Cuts with an estimated publication 
date of October 15, 2008). To put it mildly, John is a rock star (literally!) and anyone who spends any time making web sites run should reserve a space on your bookshelf for this one. I’ve been a direct beneficiary of his knowledge in the last two companies I worked for before Yahoo, and now as a colleague at Yahoo, where John runs ops for Flickr. Here’s how John describes his book and his approach in the preface:
This book is not about building complex models and simulations. It’s not about spending time running benchmarks over and over.
It’s about practical capacity planning and management that can happen in a real world. It’s about using real tools and being able to adapt to changing usage on a website that will (hopefully) grow over time. When you get a flat tire on the highway, you could spend a lot of time trying to figure out what popped your tire, or you can get on with it, pop on the spare, and keep on going.
That is the approach to capacity planning that I’m suggesting: adaptive, not theoretical.
Having been in the trenches with John on a number of occasions, I can vouch for his approach. I’m reading the early chapters now and look forward to the rest.
As a related aside, John just gave a talk at the Velocity conference that you should check out: Capacity Management for Web Operations.
(Photo of John by me in July 2005)
We’re hiring at Brickhouse in SF!
We’re hiring at Brickhouse, our San Francisco office at the corner of 3rd and Bryant, where there are lots of great things happening. If you like working on small startup-like teams to deliver products like Fire Eagle and Yahoo! Live and invent entirely new things, then check out the openings below. If you’re interested, email me (chad @ this domain) and tell me why you’re perfect for one of the roles.
- Software Engineer, Brickhouse (you will be working on Fire Eagle initially)
- Community Manager, Advanced Products / Yahoo! Live
- Flash Developer, Yahoo! Live
(Photo from our very own Tom Coates)
NetSquared Mashup Challenge: Hack Day for non-profits and NGOs
Over on the Yahoo! Developer Network blog, I wrote about something I’ve been helping out with and supporting in recent months, the NetSquared Mashup Challenge:
I wanted to draw your attention to an organization that I and Yahoo! have been supporting that you might want to support, too — NetSquared. The goal of NetSquared is simple: to help hundreds of thousands of non-profit organizations (NPOs) and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) successfully utilize the empowering capabilities of the Internet to increase their impact and achieve social change.
N2Y3 Mashup ChallengeFor the first time, NetSquared is running a really cool program called the Mashup Challenge in which they are matching up ideas from non-profits and NGOs involved in all sorts of social change to people like you (i.e. developers, product managers, and designers) who have the skills to implement them. I have been helping NetSquared promote the Mashup Challenge (see their recent YDN Theater video) because I think it’s a very practical roll-up-your-sleeves way of getting people to work together across many boundaries (company, international, etc) to produce something exciting and useful that benefits the world at large. It’s very much in the spirit of our own Yahoo! Hack Day.
To really boil it down, if you are a web builder/developer/designer, you can use these rare skills to make the world a better place. Read the rest if you would like to pitch in as a project leader! For more about NetSquared, check out the YDN Theater video below.
Must-see film for geeks and hackers: Moog
By total accident, I happened upon the documentary film Moog recently — what a pleasant surprise! I had missed its 2004 release entirely. 
The subject of the film is Bob Moog, the inventor of the modern synthesizer. The way Moog and his compatriots talk about his work with music and synthesizers will seem very familiar to software developers or anyone who lives “close to the machine” (that phrase being the title of an excellent Ellen Ullman book). The description of the film on the Plexifilm site reads in part:
. . . a portrait of the legendary figure in music and technology and his ideas about creativity, design, interactivity, spirituality and his collaborations with musicians over the years.
In the film, Moog explained that he “can feel what’s going on in a piece of electronic equipment… it’s something between discovering and witnessing.” [I love this phrasing. - CD] And he was convinced that many musicians come to “feel” a circuit in a similar way. In fact, musicians make such strong emotional connections with the electronics inside a Moog synthesiser that the inventor himself reached cult hero status.
Permanently changing the face of music, the Moog synthesiser went from being the centerpiece of a late-60s craze — appearing on records with such titles as Spotlight on the Moog, Moog Power, Music to Moog By, Country Moog, Moog Indigo, Exotic Moog and countless others — to an indispendable instrument for progressive rock bands like Emerson, Lake & Palmer and Yes to predating the electronic dance music movement of today.
In the film (which is an eminently watchable 75 minutes), Moog and his colleagues and admirers speak to each other like the geeks that they are, talking shop about the various parts of the synthesizers, their modularity and tuneability, and the difficulty they had explaining the early models to musicians and others as they attempted to commercialize their work. While the filmmakers don’t position it this way at all, the discussion of Moog Music sounds very much like the tale of any technology startup, only the startup was founded in 1953, predating even the first known uses of the term “hacker.”
After I enjoyed the film so much, I checked Metacritic and saw that it got a surprisingly low score of 51. I dug deeper into the individual reviews and I think this Austin Chronicle review nails it:
Moog is a laudatory ovation to the man whose technical work has proved essential to numerous artists working today. As such, it provides only a smattering of social context for the electronic music explosion. Moog is an inventor’s movie all the way. . . There are things to be learned here, but it would take a real aficionado to geek out on all the knobs and circuit boards on display.
I’m not a hard-core music gear aficionado, but watching Moog was a sheer pleasure, even when I didn’t understand the specific technical aspects of the discussion. Set your Tivo for Moog, or buy it here. It’s a really, really delightful film for geeks (and Moog’s enthusiasm and joy of creation is enough for me to forgive his role in the rise of prog-rock — just had to say that!)
(Trailer below)
Party at Brickhouse tomorrow night!
I just posted over at the Next blog about the latest at Brickhouse (all good — Fire Eagle and Yahoo! Live are cranking!), plus details on our party tomorrow night during Web 2.0 Expo.
I’m extremely proud of the team and the work they’ve done over the past couple of months with these products. I’m looking forward to celebrating! Hope to see some of you there and at all the various events over the next few days.
Laura Cantrell: finally saw her live (you should, too)
Whenever I come to NY, I step off the plane, grab a copy of TimeOut New York, and flip through the pages on the cab ride to my hotel to see if there are any good shows while I’m in town. More often than not, I’m handsomely rewarded (this is NY, right?) Every time I’ve thumbed through TimeOut in the past seven years, I’ve been looking for one name that has consistently eluded me: Laura Cantrell. Finally, after years of this ritual, I discovered when I landed last night that Laura Cantrell was playing TONIGHT at Joe’s Pub in Greenwich Village. I bought tickets and could barely sleep last night.
I first became aware of Laura Cantrell via her appearance on John Peel’s Peel Sessions in January 2001. If you’re not familiar with John Peel and the Peel Sessions, Peel (who died in 2004) was a legendary DJ and man of taste. His Peel Sessions ran from the 60s until his death and have included Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, Joy Division, Sonic Youth, Nirvana, Pavement, White Stripes, Pink Floyd, Bob Marley. . . so it means a lot when someone like John Peel says this about an artist (referring to her first record, When the Roses Bloom Again):
My favourite record of the last ten years and possibly my life is an LP by a New York woman born in Nashville called Laura Cantrell. It’s country, and I don’t know why I like it, but it has the same sort of effect on me as Roy Orbison had in the ’60s.
Her Peel Sessions appearance again in April 2001 made the top 125 all-time list of Peel Sessions, right there between Joy Division and Led Zeppelin (yeah, the list is in alphabetical order, but JOY DIVISION and LED ZEPPELIN!)
Like John Peel, I have a hard time explaining the effect that Laura Cantrell’s music has on me. Her voice is beautifully smooth and classic (note: just avoided temptation to use whiskey metaphor), with hints of Kitty Wells. In fact, Elvis Costello said of her: “If Kitty Wells made Rubber Soul, it would sound like Laura Cantrell.” The lyrics drip with authenticity but without a trace of the cloying self-consciousness that you often find in country music made by city-dwellers who are long-disconnected from the places and scenes they sing about. Her music is very real and very simple and utterly remarkable if you like real country music (if you don’t, please move along. . . nothing to see here).
Her new digital-only album Trains and Boats and Planes (available on Amazon, iTunes, and eMusic) is described on her site as “travel-themed, based on the Burt Bacharach-Hal David title track, along with thoughtfully-chosen songs by Roger Miller, Merle Haggard, John Hartford, Gordon Lightfoot, New Order, and three previously-released tracks.” Tonight, the standouts from the new album for me were Roger Miller’s “Train of Life” and Merle Haggard’s “Silver Wings,” but the whole show was wonderful. I embedded a couple of snippets below from my Flip camera using Flickr Video:
There are lots of Laura Cantrell songs from this album and past albums available online, many as mp3 downloads:
- Almost 20 downloads on her site. My favorites are “Churches off the Interstate” and “When the Roses Bloom Again”.
- “Love Vigilantes” (New Order cover!) and “Roll Truck Roll” (both mp3s from Download.com)
- Her MySpace page
I don’t know when or where Laura Cantrell is playing again (the show I saw tonight is the only one listed on her gigs page), but be sure to keep an eye out. I waited seven years, but it was worth it!
(If you can’t catch her live, be sure to catch her radio show on WFMU, Radio Thrift Shop, where she plays other people’s good country music.)
In NY on Wednesday and Thursday
I’m in NY on Wednesday and Thursday with a fairly full schedule, but if you read this blog and want to meet up for coffee or a drink, drop me a line. My email is chad@ the domain of this blog.
(Photo credit: Trey Ratcliff, licensed via Creative Commons)
The last time I saw the Olympic torch. . . .
. . . . I was living in Atlanta before the 1996 Olympics (and during, too). This is one of my all-time favorite photos of myself because it is ridiculous on so many levels. The Harley shirt was sort of the trucker hat of the mid-90s (at least for me).
The torch is going by near the office today, but I guess I won’t have time to grab a big Bud and lean on the hood of a police car this time. I have to work. Ah, youth.